Glenn Reynolds has been blogging today about Comcast and their general suckitude. He calls the company’s representatives “rude and inept,” which pretty well sums up my encounters with them as well. I’ve held off till now from blogging about my own recent craptastic experiences with Comcast, for fear of letting the blog get too mired in my petty complaints about miscellaneous companies. (I’ve been dealing extensively with customer-service frustration on many fronts recently: Comcast, Apple, my insurance company, and more.) But since it seems to be a hot topic… in the past month, various Comcast employees have, in no particular order:

1) Told me that my standard-issue D-Link cable modem, which I bought at a Best Buy or some such retail giant, wouldn’t work because it’s an “Indiana modem”;

2) Forced me to drive all the way to their office to return an unnecessarily rented modem once I quickly ascertained, after the installation guy left, that my modem did indeed work fine;

3) Tried to overcharge me for installation, in direct contradiction of what the Comcast website said installation would cost;

4) Refused to fix the overcharge by phone, forcing me to (again) drive all the way to their office, with printed screenshots in hand, to prove to them what’s on their own website;

5) Told me that my high-speed Internet service was set up properly when, as a phone technician later acknowledged, there was an “obvious” error preventing it from working;

6) Failed to notice, despite available evidence, that the wiring in back of our apartment building was mislabeled, such that “our” cable input really wasn’t ours at all. This resulted in considerable confusion, whereby the technicians would look at their readouts and declare that our signal was strong enough, while ongoing experience with the TV and cable modem showed that it was clearly not strong enough. The whole thing took weeks to sleuth out, when it should have taken mere minutes, if only the installation guy had been competent.

Speaking of which, 7) the installation guy, after completing his work, handed me his phone so that his supervisor could ask if I was satisfied with his work — while he was standing right there! Now there’s an effective employee-evaluation tool! No chance of biased answers at all! Coming soon: Gallup hires Barack Obama to personally call you and ask who you’ll be voting for.

Oh yeah, and 8) even to this day, after two visits from techs, numerous phone calls, and a whole lot of independent effort on my part, the digital cable signal still isn’t working properly. Long story, not worth explaining in detail here, but basically, although we can watch TV, it’s not working the way it’s supposed to, and our TiVo experience is suffering as a result. I haven’t yet summoned the energy to call Comcast (which is always an adventure) yet again, and try to get it fixed, because frankly I have better things to do with my time than deal with their incompetence. But that doesn’t mean I’m not annoyed about it.

I waited four days to have Crapcast get my cable working. The competent tech was there initially and left and it wasn’t until he returned 3 days later that he was able to see the blatantly obvious reason why the cable wasn’t working. Calling Comcast had no effect since they refused to help me because I already had an appointment, but the phone number the tech gave me was out of service almost the entire time.

At one time it made sense to give the cable companies a monopoly, because of the high costs of building the infrastructure. (primarily laying cable) However, with all of the competition that they are already getting from dishes phones and soon the internet it really makes no sense to preserve their monopoly any longer.

I prefer a cable system, but would like a choice of provider which should produce better service, a better product and better prices.

Don’t know if Knology is in your area or not, but you might want to call them to at least check.

There’s also the dish/DSL option for you too, but sometimes apartments are funny about the dishes.

We’ve had Charter for cable/internet/phone for a long time now, going back to our time in West Tenn. I don’t care much for the prices (granted, we have everything they offer other than the HD channels), but quality has always been excellent, and customer service has been reasonably prompt and efficient.

I specifically asked the Comcast installer to make sure he hooked up the TV so that I could get maximum benefit of the HDTV service I was paying for. He said he did. I decide to take a week off of TV 4 months later and unplugged everything. When I plugged it all back, I couldn’t figure out the right setup like he had had it. Finally, I decide to do the more intuitive way, and I just connected the cables to their appropriate multicolored homes. Upon doing so, I realized I HAD NOT BEEN GETTING HD SERVICE AT ALL FOR FOUR MONTHS. He had hooked it up completely wrong, and what’s more, he failed to hook it up according to the most intuitive way possible - match the colors. So I missed seeing Notre Dame football in HD for the entire season.

I was charged about 100 dollars for that visit. 50 of that was for High speed internet that he did not install and left me to do (took 3 hours). And besides, the charges were supposed to be consolidated to one 50 dollar charge total.

I had Dish Network through AT&T, and they were awful. Signals were always going out, the customer service wasn’t competent, and you have to pay extra for local channels (most of my channels were between 100 and 500, but my local channels were in the 9000s…made it difficult for channel surfing as well).

Comcast sent me a notice recently telling me I could get up to two free digital boxes. So I called the number on the notice, and waited for about 30 minutes. The lady said she set me up for the boxes and they’d be mailed. I also asked about ordering a DVR, she can’t do that, she is some sort of promotional only worker and could only set that up. A week later, no boxes, when we should have had them in 3 days. Since I didnt have the ad anymore, I called the regular 1888 Comcast number. Only had to wait 5 minutes, and they had no record of me ordering the boxes. So the nice lady offers to waive the install fee, and they will just come out and install the boxes and my new DVR all for free. Great. Sunday comes, they are supposed to be there between 7 and 10, they show up at 1030, not so bad I guess. Everything seems fine. So yesterday they call my house and ask if I want to reschedule. Reschedule what, I’;ve got the boxes, you morons. Oh, you do? End call. ONE HOUR LATER. “Yes, this is Comcast, do you want to reschedule since they didn’t come out?” THEY CAME OUT ALREADY YOU MORONS!!! UGH!

I went the main office in town yesterday to turn in my cable box and switch back to basic cable - and after 1 hour and 10 minutes in line, I finally got to talk to a representative. I can’t wait until Knology or Charter move into the area.

Oh dear, and I thought it was just the bakas in my area. . .
Well, actually, two of the guys were totally great and busted their @$$es to get everything working for me, but everyone else they worked with were worse than useless. To the point that the competant fellow who actually got everything set up (as opposed to the first guy who left before finishing) was calling the supervisors of other workers and registering complaints about the dispatchers while trying to get my cable set up, and I could tell that he felt terrible that the installation was taking so long. And the fella on the phone who helped with my internet was very good, and didn’t make me feel like an idiot for not being a computer genius.

Everyone else I dealt with was a waste of oxygen.

So, there are a few worthwhile members of that company, just not enough by far.

Be careful when you cancel Comcast. I called them and told them I wanted to cancel. They sent someone to pick up the box. Then they continued to bill me. They tried to say I just wanted the box taken, but I still wanted the service (I guess it’s theoretically possible to use the service without the box, though I don’t know how). I managed to convince American Express to reverse the charge (the fact that I started up with a dish company at the same time helped), but Comcast is still trying to bill me for the service.

comcast came to install triple play (tv phone and internet) from my old sevice (which was just cable tv and internet)…to do this they had to install a new modem…that did digital voice and internet together (you rent this from comcast as part of the package)

they told me my old modem belonged to them (even though i specifically remeber buying it from them)

they took it..when i called them..they admited it was really mine and thed send the guy back to give me the old meodem back immeidatly…of course they didnt…
its been a month..nothing..they keep pushing back the deadline to do anything about it…they also told me if i came out ot their center they would just give me a new modem of the same type..nope.

so I guess I have to be the one to defend Comcast… wow, this blows. Believe me, I am in no way in love with Comcast, but I can tell you that they are better than the other cable operators I’ve dealt with (:cough: cablevision :cough:). I wouldn’t presume to tell any of you that you’re wrong about Comcast, and I’m not saying I’ve never had any issues with them, but I’ll take Comcast (and the much better then everyone else’s OnDemand system) over satellite or CableVision ANYDAY.

I’ve actually had mixed results with Comcast. We were Internet subscribers, after having dropped our digital cable package for personal reasons, and we received a flyer offering us a great 1-year offer for “full” digital cable plus HBO, Starz, Encore, and free DVR service, at a much lower rate than we were previously paying for just extended digital service. After my wife called the number ON THE FLYER, they had no knowledge of the offer, and we had to call back a week later and CONVINCE them that they were actually making us this offer. The techs had to come out about 4 or 5 times to get it working properly because our relatively new subdivision “was wired wrong for cable”, whatever that means. Then we received our first bill and it was WAY more (like $50-$75 more) than they had advertised. But, to be fair, after we spent another hour on the phone, they VOLUNTEERED to lower our internet rate by about $20-$30/month for a year, AND they restored the originally advertised deal. But the phone service people have always been pretty friendly in Central PA. And considering that Comcast bought out Adelphia, which was just deplorable in all aspects, it’s sort of break-even for us.

Good luck switching to Comcast. We had to from Adelphia and things really got strange. I called one night to say that two channels had no sound and another was out entirely. Tried to report it and snotty young man said it had to be the network (3 different ones). Next morning’s paper reported the problem was with the entire local system. Also billed twice during turnover. No local phone but nice people at the office and we seem to have good service men in this smallish area.

I’ve had horrible results with Comcast. They overcharged me massively for the first many months. That required me to call every month and spend about one hour on the phone with them each time, going through the same routine over and over again.
The technician actually offered me a deal in which i signed the paperwork and signed up for the TV/internet deal and then Comcast told me that I don’t get the deal the technician pitched to me. It turns out that it was an expired deal I was pitched and subsequently signed up for. It was early January 2007, he sold me a December 2006 deal.
So, they just start charging me what they wanted to charge me, which was SUBSTANTIALLY MORE. I had to call every week and get some credits applied to by next bill over and over again, always talking to managers. A real pain in the butt, and now I pay about $63/month just for Internet.
Once, a technician who had just left came back to my place and walked right in and pretty much accused me of taking his cell phone!
***I still use them for the Hi-Speed because its the only service provider in my neighborhood for Hi-Speed. That part sucks a lot.***

Worst customer service I have ever experienced so far in my entire life was from Comcast, and they have been consistently bad.

Not to mention the fact that the cable man tried to hit on my fiance’ and when she declined immediately hit on my fiance’s sister who was 19 at the time (the cable tech was in his 30s). I dont mean he was being overly helpful, i mean he was making suggestive comments like “you ever been with a man in his 30s?” etc etc. I cant say much more about the subject without getting fired up. As a matter of fact, I do have a somewhat-close friend that works for comcast who blatantly told me that the reason they give you such a huge window to be at your home (usually between 10a-2p) is because they are efffffffing around all day. He then proceeded to show me that he sits in the back of his comcast truck and watches baseball games on a mini tv he has. you being serious comcast? clean it up

In Houston we are being switched from Time Warner to Comcast since Comcast has bought out Time Warner (they had a partnership here). We’ve actually had OK luck with Time Warner–previously they had lowered our monthly bill when we threatened to switch, and we got a good deal when we signed up for cable TV after ditching it for a year. With the broadband switch, we have to give up our roadrunner e-mail addresses anyway, so it’s a good time to look around. I’m not at all pleased hearing all these Comcast stories but the alternatives here (I live in a suburb which offers Windstream bundle of DSL with Dish Network television or ATT bundle of DSL with Dish Network television) do not sound all that much better.

Luckily, my experience with Comcast has been pretty good, except the time back in 2003 or 2004 when they MAILED me a CD to change my service at XMAS!. Oddly enough, the disk got broken. Imagine that. Plus, of course, the install had to be done after Dec 19 and before Dec 30, during which time I was 600 miles away visiting family. Ah, well, that was relatively minor and since I’m reasonably computer and cable and wiring literate I got it up and working with only a single call to a help center in Toronto (I’m in the Detroit area).

The original cable installer turned out to be a guy I know (imagine the odds in a suburb of 80,000 and a metro area of 1.8 million) who was also competent. Decided while he was there to overwire in case I wanted to change, upgrade, alter later. I’m getting hi-speed cable, and it’s been (knock on wood) just fine after some glitches in the first few months. I added a wireless network and am running my AT&T wireless phone system through my server. We only get the medium TV package (don’t really want HD as we watch very few movies, etc.) and I’ve had relatively few, relatively short-lived, easily fixed problems.

As for *most* installers, my son has been a lineman for SBC/ATT and did cable installing on the side. The stories he tells me about goof-offs and careless installers and just general buttheads working for Comcast are Legion. He says there are some real good ones, too, but he estimates only about 1-in-4 or 5 is really good.

More competition, please. I think most of us would suck up a reasonable extra cost for good service.

You know if someone running for President made “Freedom from Cable Tyranny” a part of the political platform it would probably get some additional votes. I’ve got basic HD cable + internet from Comcast and I’m paying about $120 a month. Frankly I don’t see why I am paying that much as it shouldn’t cost that much to begin with. Particularly the internet itself shouldn’t be more than, at the very most, $20 a month rather than the $55 it currently is.

It still amazes me that the telecom companies got over $400 billion dollars worth of tax breaks a decade ago to wire the country with fiber optic but we’re still mucking around with copper.

A few months ago they moved a channel that gave TV listings from basic cable to their extended package. I called to complain and mentioned to the person on the phone that I had a TV listings channel on basic cable for a couple of decades. He told my I was wrong. WTF? How does this clown know what former cable companies pumped into my TV the last 30 years? Crapcast didn’t take over the local cable monopoly (something we need to unite to disolve) until recently. I wish I could quit Crapcast, but can’t. Damn monopolies.

I have DirecTV because my cable bills were going up at an extraordinary rate. And while I’ve had my problems with DirecTV, I’ve learned to become persistent with them. The low level people you get when you first call cannot help you with complicated technical problems. You need to get to someone above them, but it will take a while. They are always polite although at times I am less than polite. But they have, in the end, taken care of my problems and have taken down fixes to software I’ve suggested.

I’m now on a preferred customer list. When I call, I get through a bit quicker than I used to. So it takes some patience and some insistence, but overall I’m happy with DirecTV’s support. It is much better than what I got from cable.

My brother-in-law recently got a new Comcast hookup for his HDTV (I have DirecTV myself). Bro-in-law is an Army Lt. Colonel with a technical background, and he quizzed the installer on how many HDTV sets he’d hooked up before. “Hundreds,” the guy said, “I’ve been doing HD hookups for over a year now.”

So after this guy actually hooks up the converter box to BIL’s TV, he stands back, tunes to a channel and says, “There you go, great picture.” BIL looks at the TV, looks at the installer and says, “That isn’t HD. That picture’s terrible.” The Comcast installer argues vehemently that he’s done everything right and that the picture is, in fact, HDTV. BIL goes online, Googles the model number of the converter box, and finds that you have to enter a special code from the remote to activate HD. He does so, and presto, a real HDTV picture appears.

The Comcast guy is stunned: “I’ve never heard of that before.” BIL asks, “So you’ve never done that for any other box you’ve installed in over a year?”

I’ve had Comcast services, broadband and cable, for about a year now. They send me about two notices EVERY DAY offering me discounts to sign up with Comcast Digital Services.

I tried calling once to tell them they were wasting their time and money by sending these mailings to an existing customer, but they claimed they could not stop them.

There really should a website where you can post photos of the coax cables running all over your building. My apartment building has coax going everywhere. I don’t know how the techs can figure the labyrinth of cables.

We live in a neighborhood with houses ranging from 120 to 160 years old, and as a result, much of the modern infrastructure has been added in ramshackle ways. We had a sudden degradation in picture quality (static & fuzz on several channels), and it took NINE different calls to their service department over a ten-day period to finally get the issue resolved. Each time, a tech would come to our house, look at the way the cable was run all over hell’s half-acre to get from the box to our house, find the rough area where the cable was damaged by water seepage, and say, “It’s going to require a supervisor to come out and authorize heavy-duty cabling; I’ll report it, and someone will be in touch.”

The first “supervisor” called us after the first three service techs dispatched had all said the same thing, and he missed three appointments before calling to assure us that he was on his way to our site. He never showed up, and we were told later that he had “suffered a medical emergency while en route”, which sounded like a blatant lie, but who knows? Two more service techs showed up and gave us the same diagnosis, and we finally got a call from an actual area supervisor. He showed up with wiring diagrams, stayed in constant phone contact with his main office, and swore under his breath at the way our neighborhood’s service was arranged. He outlined a short-term fix to me and let me speak with the contractor from Philadelphia who was going to come do the job to make sure we could meet up, and got contact information from the pertinent property owners about what he’d need to do to rewire for a long-term fix. He gave me his personal number in case of any issues. The massive rewiring hasn’t happened yet, although there’s been some progress.

The guy from Philadelphia showed up on time the next morning (though he needed to call me to resolve a problem with bad directions), and fixed the problem in about 45 minutes, starting from, “So, I hear you have a service problem…” to “That should do it; anything else I can help you with?”. I have no clue why we needed cable techs imported from Philly, but he was great. The actual supervisor was sharp, too. The phone service people were responsive and friendly within the limits of what they could do, but the actual techs on the ground really stunk. They’d diagnose the problem, but then they’d pass off the responsibility, and log the call as “resolved” when it wasn’t, or screw it up in other ways.

I got a call a couple of weeks later asking if I would be willing to take a few moments to complete a survey about my satisfaction with my recent Comcast service issue. I gleefully complied, and told them if anyone ever provides decent competition, they’ll wax Comcast’s sorry butt.

Geez, I’m actaully happy I stumbled on this post. We’ve had Comcast for several years, since they bought out/assimilated a local company. In our area of SE Michigan the service at all levels is significantly better than what’s being reported here. Better than any other untility for that matter. (Don’t get my wife started on AT&T) I suppose it’s as much luck of the draw as far as installers go. The ones I’ve talked to are contractors, so they don’t sit around much. The service guys have been Comcast employees and all seemed to know what they were about.

I’m sure this will draw out dozens of comments from the metro Detroit area with their own horror stories, but compared to what I’m reading here, Comcast has done OK by me.

I’m currently with Comcast, but I’m a former DirecTV customer. Comcast doesn’t suck any more or less; it just sucks differently. Given a non-shitty HDTV provider who supports my Series 3 TiVo, I’d cheerfully kick Comcast to the curb.

Last fall, Comcast began promoting their digital voice service in my area, a direct competitor to Vonage. At around this time I also began reading about how Comcast had implemented a plan to ensure their services got priority on their network.

So, with magical synchronicity, just as they rolled out the Comcast digital voice service, my Vonage service, which had previously performed flawlessly, suddenly experienced a harsh buzzing, nonexistent at off-peak times but gradually increasing until at peak hours it was so bad that the system could not even decipher the signal from a key when I dialed a number.

It’s fairly obvious what happened: Comcast was downgrading Vonage packets. They are tagging them and marking them low priority, so when the network is busy packet loss increases to to the point the service is unusable. It’s the Microsoft business model.

CommieCast bought out Aldelphia in our area (Norte Long Beach.) Moved in, jacked up the rates 120% and decreased the throughput noticably. All while loudly proclaiming that they were doing it to make the customer’s experience richer. Calling them to complain was truly an Orwelian experience.

[…] Someone started a rant about Comcast’s poor service. Glenn Reynolds picked up on it and is now running a poll asking his readers to help him decide which service to switch to. Others are piling on. […]

I’ve been consulting for the cable and sat industries most of my career … and been hearing cable getting trashed like this for a few decades now. A few observations:

* You’d still be watching 40 channels of analog garbage if it weren’t for Direct and Dish. They aren’t great, but the digital competition introduced in the last 10-odd years was at least something …
* Remember that Crapcast, TWC, Cox, Charter and the rest of this lot are basically wholly owned subsidiaries of the FCC. If you don’t much care for the government-like service from your TV provider, your ire would be better directed at government ownership of the airwaves, not the bumbling bureaucrats enforcing it. I know they look like a private company, but trust me: they’re not, and they know they’re not.
* Pull hard for Internet-based TV. The potential of this seriously freaks out cable execs — even though they generally own the broadband wires. It’s not their model and they don’t understand it.

I had 2 remotes go bad and had my sister take them over to their office for exchange. They gave her the wrong ones so I head over to their office and arrive 5 minutes before closing time, while I’m coming down the wheelchair ramp on my van one of the ladies working there comes to the door and looks right at me and locks the door. They ignore my knocks and after a few minutes I give up. I thought about waiting at the employee entrance and giving them a piece of my mind but decided it would probably just cause more problems. I e-mailed and called them about this and asked to have a supervisor from the local office contact me so I could voice my displeasure with my treatment but all I could get was an apology from the person on the phone. Needless to say I made a visit to the office 3 weeks later with 3 boxes, an HD-DVR and a cable modem. The switch to DirecTV and DSL hasn’t been painless but it is better than Comcast.

On the good side of things, I have had Dish Network for over 8 years now and have had only a receiver go bad. A quick phone call and three days later I had a new box. Hooked it up and mailed the bad one back. No extra charges. I dumped cable for a dish and even got free installation. I have had dsl through ATT for over 2 years with few problems. Even getting help from ATT was easy. Maybe I’m just lucky but I would not give up either service.

Brendan - is there any chance your problem might be due to the use of signal-spitters from where the Coax cable initially enters your home/apartment ?

I don’t remember if computer or HDTV is supposed to get the ‘first’ signal, meaning highest proportion, but I know that during a modem-swap visit (not relevant to story otherwise), the tech reconnected the assorted coaxes differently from what had worked well - and the modem feed and one of the lesser TV feeds were swapped …

It didn’t make any perceptible difference to the TV picture quality, but the data transfer rate plummeted … fortunately, I had been told about being very careful to reconnect the feeds specifically, and I re-did them the way they had been done before, and that resolved the problem …

My setup has the coax at initial entry going to a 3-way splitter, and the DSL-modem gets the first feed by itself … the two cable boxes share the second feed … and the rest of the house’s TVs share the third feed … (we don’t often have more than 4 TVs and the computers going at the same time … (grin)) … the original competent tech explained it to me that the DSL modem needed an un-diluted/unshared third of the signal, the two converters could get by on 15% each, and most TVs can get by just fine on even less … - and he seems to be right …
Anyway, hope this helps …